With the holiday season in full-swing, I thought it would be fun to use various holiday words and phrases and see if I could find people in historical records that carried these words and phrases as actual names. Here are a few that I found:
1. Mary Christmas
There are many instances of this name appearing, but [...]

Much talk goes on in our office about those who are Native American and those who are not. This is because many people request our services to find their Native American ancestors and most often documentation shows that they are not. This is true because most of the people who submit these requests are Caucasian. [...]

Seguido hay comentarios en nuestra oficina sobre quiénes son indios americanos y quienes no lo son. Esto es porque diario recibimos peticiones de personas que quieren que les ayudemos a documentar su genealogía india americana. Y como las peticiones casi siempre vienen de personas caucásicas, sabemos por experiencia que la mayor parte del tiempo la [...]

So you think you’re part Native American? As one of the Native American specialists here at ProGenealogists, I receive almost daily inquiries about our services from people who specifically want to trace a Native American ancestor. Perhaps your family tree is also decorated with similar stories. My own family had such a tradition. Supposedly my great-great [...]

Recently someone posted on Facebook a link to this article about Hispanic names trending down among the Hispanic population in the U.S. Names like William, Mark and Theodore are prefered over Guillermo, Marco and Teodoro. I didn’t pay much attention to it at first, but then my niece was born just over a week ago and [...]

Hace poco alguien publicó en Facebook el enlace a éste articulo que dice que entre la población Hispana de los Estados Unidos los nombres Hispanos están pasando de moda. Ahora es más preferible usar los nombres William, Mark y Theodore en vez de Guillermo, Marco y Teodoro. Me llamó la atención el articulo hace poco más de [...]

Polish Marriage Records Online
Kyle J. Betit
Finding an ancestor’s home village or town in Poland can be a difficult job – especially because there are few large databases of Polish records to check online. Recently, however, some marriage databases have become available that are impressive and a good start on indexing Polish marriages online. Beware that [...]

I was recently “over my head” in tracing the origins of some former slaves – that is, “over my head” in both the sense that slave research is difficult (emotionally and academically) and the research was even more complicated because of the specific goal the client had in mind.
While I can’t help anyone with the [...]

An excellent book was recently published regarding source documents in Kiev archives relating to Jewish history and culture, as part of the Project Judaica series on records of Jewish people in the old Russian Empire. The book describes many documents relevant for genealogy. The book, by Efim Melamed and Mark Kopovetsky, is written in Russian, [...]

I spent about ten days in Kiev, Ukraine, in September conducting research at archives. Most of the records relevant to genealogical research in Ukraine are kept in one of three types of archives:

Central State Historical Archives;
Oblast Archives;
Local Civil Registry Offices (ZAGS Offices).

I visited all three types of archives mentioned above during the visit to Kiev. [...]